The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Some cloud computing systems may utilize the idea of a pool as a fundamental organizational concept for the allocation and abstraction of physical resources. A pool serves as both the logical container to which a specific physical resource (e.g., a physical server) is assigned and the abstracted whole (cloud computing infrastructure?) from which logical or virtual slices are allocated to cloud service consumers. Existing solutions assign physical resources to specific pools and thereafter treat the assignments as relatively static. Moving a resource (e.g., a physical server) from one pool to another is often a relatively complicated procedure which must be performed carefully by a knowledgeable practitioner i.e., with some awareness of the internals of the allocation mechanism, lest the datastore used to track such assignments becomes out of sync with the actual (or perceived) allocation. However, existing solutions focus on dynamic allocations, i.e., the dividing up of the existing pool into logical slices assigned to specific users, and fail to adequately assign resources to a pool to increase the available capacity of the overall pool.